Knight Initiative Funded Researchers

Dr. Serena Yeung-Levy is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Her research focus is on developing artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to enable new capabilities in biomedicine and healthcare. She has extensive expertise in deep learning and computer vision, and has developed computer vision algorithms for analyzing diverse types of visual data ranging from video capture of human behavior, to medical images and cell microscopy images.

Dr. Wernig is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Chemical and Systems Biology and Co-Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University. He graduated with an M.D. Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich where he trained in developmental genetics in the lab of Rudi Balling. After completing his residency in Neuropathology and General Pathology at the University of Bonn, he then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research/ MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Thomas Christian Südhof was born in Göttingen, Germany, on Dec. 22 in 1955, obtained his M.D. and doctoral degrees from the University of Göttingen in 1982. He performed his doctoral thesis work at the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen with Prof. Victor P. Whittaker on the biophysical structure of secretory granules. From 1983-1986, Südhof trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein at UT Southwestern in Dallas, TX, and elucidated the structure, expression and cholesterol-dependent regulation of the LDL receptor gene.

Ivan Soltesz received his doctorate in Budapest and conducted postdoctoral research at universities at Oxford, London, Stanford and Dallas. He established his laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, in 1995. He became full Professor in 2003, and served as department Chair from 2006 to July 2015. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as the James R. Doty Professor of Neurosurgery and Neurosciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Professor Mehrdad Shamloo has held several positions at various biopharmaceutical companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, with demonstrated extensive focus on both CNS drug discovery and pre-clinical development. In 2008, Dr. Shamloo joined Stanford University and established the Behavioral and Functional Neuroscience Laboratory (BFNL), as well as his research laboratory, which focused on the furtherment of understanding of normal and pathological brain functions in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), substance use disorders and pain.

Kawin Setsompop is a Professor of Radiology and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering. His research focuses on the development of novel MRI acquisition methods, with the goal of creating imaging technologies that can be used to help better understand brain structure and function for applications in Healthcare and Health sciences. He received his Master’s degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently a faculty at the A.A.

Birgitt Schüle, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on medical genetics and stem cell modeling to uncover disease mechanisms and pathways involved in neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease and related disorders. She is dedicated to developing novel therapeutic strategies that contribute to the advancement of precision medicine.